During the height of the Zapatista uprising in the mid 1990s - a rebellion fueled by land conflicts - southern Chiapas state had a rate of nearly 40 per 100,000 people with 1,000 homicides a year. By 2008, that fell to 8 per 100,000 people with 364 killings.It's not just Chiapas; throughout Mexico's southern region, rural killings have dropped off the charts since the 1990s. Given that the degree of the decline is such that a five-fold increase in drug killings in three years is more than offset, this is rather remarkable, a mini-Mexican miracle in the midst of the anarchy in Juárez and widespread violence across the North and in much of the interior of the country as well. I suspect that much of that is unrelated to Marcos, but I'd love to see a deeper explanation.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
The Beginnings of a Fascinating Study
Via the Mexican Institute, the Associated Press ran an article about the fact that as bad as Mexico's conflict with organized crime has gotten, the country is still safer than it was a decade ago. It hints at the reason here:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I agree that a state-by-state analysis would be fascinating. Just Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Michoacan alone would be super interesting, as would historical data on the safest states. One thing: I've seen some references in the past to unreliable homicide numbers, specifically in Guerrero. Obviously the driving assumption behind focusing on murders is that the numbers are far more reliable than any other crime, but it's not impossible to imagine a situation in which significant (in the sense of enough to notably affect the homicide rates) numbers go unreported in parts of the montana. Of course, in international comparative terms, this phenomenon would probably even more in Colombia and Brazil (not to mention Baltimore and the vacants).
Either way, glad to see the nuanced part of the tale is catching on, and please pass along any good analysis you see on this.
RE the different types of crime reporting, yeah I think that's true. You hear people from Mexico City say that from time to time. The murder rate's not too bad, but other types of crime and the institutional capacity to combat them are really miserable.
There's a good report that goes a little deeper here. Although if I remember, it doesn't do much explaining as to why the South has stopped being so dangerous compared to the 90s, it just offers the numbers.
Whoops I didnt put the link in:
http://72.52.156.225/Estudio.aspx?Estudio=indice-delictivo-cidac
Hopefully you'll check this...
Post a Comment